Heavy Caturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

By Lesley Ann Ivory

A couple of days ago, historian Garrett Graff posted a powerful essay on his Substack Doomsday Scenario: The physical weight of Trumpism.

One constant theme of conversations I’ve had over the last year has been the physical heaviness people feel in Trump’s America. I certainly felt it yesterday in the wake of that horrific murder — there’s nothing else to call it — of a mother by an out-of-control ICE officer in Minneapolis….

To me, there’s actually a simple explanation for that heaviness: It’s the weight of the shift from “zero to non-zero.” There are so many aspects of our daily life that we’d never had to weigh before; so many new possible horrors that we have to carry in our minds each day. We forget how much of the basic fabric of our country has been altered in the space of just a year, how many of our freedoms have been impinged, and how many things we took for granted that now we can’t.

Before last year, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that as a US resident walking the streets, regardless of immigration status, you’d be swept up by masked secret police and deported to a foreign torture gulag.

Now that chance is at least non-zero.

Before last year, if you were a dedicated federal employee there was a zero percent chance your department, bureau, or agency would be closed over the course of the weekend, with decades of work by thousands of people, who had carefully stewarded taxpayer dollars to accomplish a mission authorized and supported by bipartisan congresses across decades tossed in the “woodchipper” before any had the chance to object, dooming millions of the world’s most vulnerable to die in the years to come to feed the ego of a single tech oligarch.

Now that chance is at least non-zero.

Before last year, if you were a daycare worker, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that immigration agents (or right-wing influencers) would barge into the safe space you had worked so hard to create havoc and, in some cases, do physical violence.

Now that chance is at least non-zero.

Before last year, if you were an immigrant parent without a criminal record, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that dropping off your child at school would lead to your detention and immediate removal from your country.

Now that chance is at least non-zero.

Before last year, if you were a graduate student, professor, or medical researcher working on a long-term federally-funded study, one that had gone through the interminable approval processes and started up to help lives and advance the frontiers of our collective knowledge, you didn’t have to worry your funding would disappear overnight — that you’d be out of a job, your months or years of research thrown into the trash, your own professional trajectory destroyed and the lives of your research subjects upended in a matter of hours or a few days. Similarly, if you were a university administrator, you didn’t have to wake up each morning wondering if the federal government has, without warning or process, canceled the visas of your students.

The list goes on. Graff provides an encyclopedic description of Trump’s cruel, evil actions over in the first year of his second term. I hope you’ll go read all of them. More examples:

Before last year, if you were an American, there was effectively a zero percent chance that you’d wake up to the news that historic parts of the White House itself were being destroyed without warning or consultation to feed the president’s ego.

Now that chance is much more than non-zero….

Before last year, if you criticized the president, there was a zero percent chance that the president would demand you be criminally prosecuted and proceed to fire anyone who refused until he found some flunky willing to indict you on kangaroo court charges.

Now that chance is at least non-zero….

If you were a federal judge, you knew that threats might come with the position, but there was a zero chance that the President of the United States would single you out for threats and encourage supporters to attack you for doing your job. Nor did you need to worry whether the US government officials appearing before you on behalf of the Justice Department would ignore your legally-binding court orders and lie to you in court.

Now, in both instances, that chance is at least non-zero.

And then there’s this week’s other big news: Before last year, if you were a NATO ally and partner of the United States, you never had to worry that one day the United States would begin, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, formulating military plans to seize your sovereign territory.

By Sandra biermann

Not all of these changes and shifts are equal in importance, surely. Some are abstract, others very much tangible. Some personal, some communal. Surely, also, some of these shifts began to unfold before Trump returned to power — although in many cases his rise accelerated or encouraged the shift — and unfortunately some communities and populations have long had reasons to fear government in various forms or question the “protection” of the police, but never have Americans collectively experienced anything like the accumulation of mental weight we have in this last year.

All that weight is piled upon all that we also accumulated in 2020, from Covid to George Floyd to January 6th — the last, also disastrous year of another Trump presidency — and all that other mental weight we’ve accumulated that comes from the rising fear and collective understanding that because of GOP policies, far-right culture and media, and a nation that has lost its collective mind, you cannot count on being safe in the places where we should feel safest — synagogueschurchesschoolsuniversitiesoffices, and more — and that when you kiss your children and send them to school, you can’t guarantee that they will come home at the end of the day.

That heaviness you feel, that drag on your mental health, that drain on your emotional energy and lethargy in the face of world events, like yesterday, is real. We are all carrying a lot of new weight in the era of Trumpism.

It’s the weight of non-zero.

As it turns out, that simple switch from zero to non-zero — even if it any or all of the above is still infinitesimally unlikely, it is no longer effectively zero. And that tiniest bit of switch, that binary shift from 0 to greater than zero, turns out to be something that we can all feel in our daily lives.

Before last year, if you were a mom, with a glovebox full of stuffed animals, driving your SUV through a peaceful residential street, eager to see your six-year-old child at the end of the day — a wife with no criminal record who had committed no federal crimes, not being sought by any authorities anywhere — a poet who cared about your neighbors — there was, effectively, a zero percent chance you had to worry about being shot in the face by masked, ill-trained, aggressive federal officers who would then pull their guns on a doctor who tried to help you and let you die in the street.

Now that chance is at least non-zero.

I’ve quoted a lot of the piece, but the list is much longer that what I’ve shared here. When you read the list of outrages all at once, it makes sense that we feel so overwhelmed. I really wonder if my psyche can survive the next 3 years.

The News as usual is endless, but I’m going to focus on the ICE story today.

I’m sure everyone has seen the videos of the murder in Minneapolis, including the latest one that was recorded by the murderer himself, now identified as Jonathan Ross. I’ll just share this brief summary from Ellie Quinlan Houghtalinig at The New Republic: “F*cking B*tch”: What ICE Agents Did Right After Minnesota Shooting.

A newly released camera perspective of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis has shed additional light on the moments leading up to Renee Nicole Good’s death. [You can watch the video at the link.]

The previously unseen cellphone footage, obtained and published by Allen Analysis Newsroom, depicts a federal agent’s vantage point of the lethal encounter, and captures audio of at least one ICE agent calling Good a “fucking bitch” after they shot and killed her.

The exchange, as captured in the new video, begins with a 360 degree shot of Good’s red Honda Pilot, with the agent walking from the passenger side to the front to the rear of the SUV, presumably documenting the vehicle and its license plates. In doing so, the agent filming captures video of Good’s dog in the backseat, his large, black head hanging out of the open window.

As the agent passes in front of the driver’s side window, Good can be seen and heard telling him: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

“I’m not mad at you,” she shouts again as he walks behind her car.

The agent’s masked reflection is caught in the glass of the backseat windows as he moves away.

Another woman—presumably Good’s wife, Rebecca Brown Good—is filming the agent while standing next to the rear of the SUV. Her voice can be heard over a long shot of the vehicle’s license plate.

“Show your face,” she said. “It’s OK, we don’t change our plates every morning, so it’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later. U.S. citizen, former fucking veteran—disabled veteran. You want to come at us? I say you go and get yourself some lunch, big boy.”

Someone can then be heard telling Good to “get out of the fucking car,” when she reverses and then pushes the vehicle forward. As she does so, several shots can be heard. The image loses focus. When the camera stabilizes, Good’s car can be seen careening away.

“Fucking bitch,” an agent said.

Read discussion of the video at the TNR link.

Also from The New Republic: New Details Emerge on ICE Agent Who Shot a Woman in Minnesota, by Edith Olmstead.

Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, reportedly had a history of escalating arrests with violent tactics.

Ross, a 10-year law enforcement veteran, was injured in June during the chaotic attempted arrest of Roberto Carlos Muñoz, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala with prior convictions for criminal sexual conduct, who drove off during a traffic stop in Bloomington, Minnesota.

by Laura Seeley

Ross and another agent pulled in front of Muñoz’s vehicle to force him to stop. The two officers exited their vehicle and aimed their firearms at Muñoz, demanding he provide documentation, which he did, according to the affidavit. When the officers demanded that Muñoz roll down his window, he refused. Ross pulled out his taser, which he aimed at Muñoz’s chest, and the officers warned Muñoz that they would break the window if he did not comply.

Ross used a spring-loaded window punch to break the rear driver’s side window, and reached in to try and unlock the driver’s side door. Muñoz put the car in drive and dragged Ross roughly 100 yards, while Ross fired his taser “at least twice,” according to the affidavit. The agent later testified that he fired his taser 10 times.

Eventually, Ross was shaken loose from the window, falling into the street. “The agent suffered serious lacerations on both arms, which required 33 stitches in total to close,” the affidavit said.

“I was fearing for my life. I knew I was gonna get drug,” Ross said, according to a transcript of his court testimony from December. “And the fact I couldn’t get my arm out, I didn’t know how long I would be drugged. So I was kind of running with the vehicle.”

The claim that an officer was “fearing for their life” is a common phrase used by officers to justify their use of deadly force—and has become a familiar refrain for ICE agents who claim protesters’ vehicles were “weaponized” against them.

Is it just me, or does it seem kind of stupid to put your arm into a car that is very likely to start moving? I have to say this guy does sound stupid: using “drug” and “drugged” instead of dragged. And why was a guy back on the street if, according to JD Vance probably had PTSD from the previous incident?

Complaining about a CNN headline that described the incident, Vance said: “What that headline leaves out is the fact that that very ICE officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car six months ago, 34 stitches in his leg, so you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?”

Setting aside the fact that it was Ross’s arm, not his leg, that was injured, Vance’s remarks also absurdly suggest that any officer hurt in the line of duty has a free pass to remain in the field and shoot dead civilians if they get scared. That’s exactly why desk duty exists, right?

A piece about Renee Good from Literary Hub by Jonny Diamond: Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem.

Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune:

[An ICE agent] shot and killed a woman in south Minneapolis during a morning confrontation between community members and federal officers […] Several residents of the area who witnessed the scene said agents were ordering the woman out of the vehicle. A video showed agents around the vehicle as the driver reversed and then pulled forward. One agent appeared to fire multiple rounds into the car.

By Vladimir Dunjic

The bio from a now-private Instagram account belonging to Good describes her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” In 2020, when she went by Renée Nicole Macklin, she won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” [….]

This is murder in broad daylight by the Trump administration, obvious and brutal. And though each senseless act of violence committed by the state upon its citizens echoes the thousands that have gone before, we cannot become numb to the particular (and intensifying) depravities of this administration.

So if the violence of the deportations, and the crackdowns, and the cuts, and the raids, and the air strikes, haven’t been enough for you, let something so simple and evil as the daytime execution of a poet move you to action.

Here is the full poem from Poets.org:

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin

 

i want back my rocking chairs,

 

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

 

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

 

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

ribosome

endoplasmic—

lactic acid

stamen

 

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

 

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

 

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

 

 

now i can’t believe—

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

You’ve Got a Friend, Paul Lovering

Minnesota Public Radio published a statement from Renee Good’s wife Becca Good: Renee Macklin Good’s wife says she nurtured kindness.

Here’s the full statement from Becca Good:

First, I want to extend my gratitude to all the people who have reached out from across the country and around the world to support our family.

This kindness of strangers is the most fitting tribute because if you ever encountered my wife, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, you know that above all else, she was kind. In fact, kindness radiated out of her.

Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.

Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow. Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.

Like people have done across place and time, we moved to make a better life for ourselves. We chose Minnesota to make our home. Our whole extended road trip here, we held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles.

What we found when we got here was a vibrant and welcoming community, we made friends and spread joy. And while any place we were together was home, there was a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other. Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever.

We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness. Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy. She is pure sunshine.

On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.

Renee leaves behind three extraordinary children; the youngest is just six years old and already lost his father. I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way.

We thank you for the privacy you are granting our family as we grieve. We thank you for ensuring that Renee’s legacy is one of kindness and love. We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.

That’s all I have for you today. Please take care of yourselves.

 

 


Finally Friday Reads: Descent into Cruelty and Madness

“The United States of Trump has been eliminated from the Quidditch World Cup. FAFO.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

While I have tried to prepare myself for the daily shock of what comes out of Trump’s mouth and his administration’s actions, I never seem to reach a point where I don’t spend massive amounts of time feeling overwhelmed. Today is no different. I also keep thinking all the physical work and concentration it’s been taking to work on the house would get the other stuff out of my head. That doesn’t work either, because it appears endless.

JJ sent me this link this morning, and I just can’t get over this headline in The Guardian. “‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says power constrained only by ‘my own morality.’ President says morality ‘the only thing that can stop me’ in New York Times interview on limits to his authority.”Maya Yang reports the story.

“Donald Trump has said, “I don’t need international law” and that his power is limited only by his “own morality”.

In a new interview with the New York Times, Trump said the only constraint to his power as president of the US is “my own morality, my own mind”.

“It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He went on to concede “I do” in regards to whether his administration needed to adhere to international law, but said: “It depends on what your definition of international law is.”

Trump, who spoke to the newspaper as his administration looks into “a range of options” in attempts to gain control of Greenland, also emphasized the importance of ownership.

“Ownership is very important,” Trump said, adding: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

Trump also dismissed concerns that his decision to oust Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s president would set the precedent of a potential Chinese takeover of Taiwan or Russia’s attempt to control Ukraine.

Justifying the US’s attacks on Venezuela, Trump repeated his controversial claims Maduro had allegedly sent gang members into the US.

“This was a real threat … You didn’t have people pouring into China. You didn’t have drugs pouring into China. You didn’t have all of the bad things that we’ve had. You didn’t have the jails of Taiwan opened up and the people pouring into China,” Trump said, adding that no criminals were “pouring into Russia”.

He said that he does not believe Chinese president Xi Jinping would seize control of Taiwan, telling the New York Times: “That’s up to him, what he’s going to be doing. But you know, I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t.”

 

The Guardian’s Jonathan Yerushalmy followed up to day with this headline. “Morality, military might, and a sense of mischief: key takeaways from Trump’s New York Times interview. Trump sounds off on Venezuela’s future, Taiwan’s security and his aims for Greenland, days after operation to seize Nicolás Maduro.” That’s quite the list of ways to become an international piriah.

Just days after launching an unprecedented operation in Venezuela to seize its president and effectively take control of its oil industry, Donald Trump sat down with New York Times journalists for a wide-ranging interview that took in international law, Taiwan, Greenland and weight-loss drugs.

The president, riding high on the success of an operation that has upended the rules of global power, spoke candidly and casually about the new world order he appears eager to usher in; an order governed not by international norms or long-lasting alliances, but national strength and military power.

Here are some key points from his interview with the Times.

1. US is in Venezuela for the long haul

When asked how long he would be “running Venezuela”, Trump said it would be “much longer” than a year.

After Trump initially claimed that the US was running the South American country, in the hours after the operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro, members of Trump’s cabinet sought to downplay America’s role in its governance. Since then however, Trump has continued to assert that he is in fact “in charge”.

2. Seize Greenland or preserve the Nato alliance?

Trump has spent the days since the attack on Venezuela renewing his push for the US to acquire Greenland and has not ruled out using military force to take it. He has framed the issue as one of national security, but when pushed by White House correspondent David E Sanger on why he hasn’t chosen to simply reopen bases and send troops to Greenland under the terms of a decades-old treaty, Trump insisted the territory must be part of the US.

“I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with … a lease or a treaty,” the president said, adding “that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

When asked by the Times whether obtaining Greenland or preserving the Nato alliance was more important, Trump declined to answer. He did however acknowledge that it “may be a choice” between the two options.

Greenland was formerly ruled by Denmark – which still controls its foreign and security policies – and both countries are members of Nato. However in his interview on Wednesday, Trump said that alliance was essentially useless without the US.

“I think we’ll always get along with Europe, but I want them to shape up … If you look at Nato, Russia I can tell you is not at all concerned with any other country but us,” he said.

You may read the rest at the link. Dr. Paul Krugman also had a good headline for his latest SubStack post. “The Mad King’s Madness Deepens. Trump wants war, war, and more war – even against Americans.” He may want the Nobel Peace Prize, but he is definitely undermining his own arguments.

Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.

And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.

So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.

What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Times reports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”

The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed.

And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where, on Wednesday, an ICE agent killedRenee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.

Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.

A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.

But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.

So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful — so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.

And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending.

Michelle Goldberg used her column at the New York Times to further elucidate the murder of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE Agent. “By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All.”

Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”

The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”

In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”

It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.

Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.

Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”

Screenshot

I’ll conclude today’s offerings with an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack: Letters from an American.

On MS NOW today, columnist Philip Bump broke down when talking about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis. “I have a six year old,” he said. “And…seeing the image of the stuffed animals in the glove compartment of her car—really emotional for me and…what I take away from this is, for me that’s the thing that stands out: that this was a family that could have been like mine.”

Bump went on to emphasize that “there are a lot of situations, a lot of incidents that have involved ICE, have involved the government over the course of the past thirteen months in which there is resonance for other families in similar ways,” but what he hit on in his first reaction to Good’s killing was the one the administration must fear most of all. Good was a white, suburban mother, whose ex-husband told reporters she was a Christian stay-at-home mom, and Bump is a white man.

President Donald J. Trump’s people see that demographic as their base. If it turns on Trump, they are politically finished, as finished as elite southern enslavers were when Harriet Beecher Stowe reminded American mothers of the fragility of their own childrens’ lives to condemn the sale of Black children; as finished as the second Ku Klux Klan was when its leader kidnapped, raped, and murdered 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer; as finished as the white segregationists were when white supremacists murdered four little girls in church in 1963.

Evidence that President Donald J. Trump has sexually abused children would likely be enough to crater his political support from this group, making it no accident that the administration is openly flouting the law that required the full release of the Epstein Files by December 19, 2025. The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of those files, and many of them were so heavily redacted as to be useless. In a court filing on Monday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “substantial work remains to be done” before it can release them all.

But there is no hiding the murder of Renee Good, captured on video by several witnesses as it was. And so the Trump administration is working desperately to smear Good and to convince the public that, contrary to widespread video evidence, the federal agent put in place by the Trump regime shot her in self-defense.

Just remember what Warren Zevon once said: “Enjoy every Sandwich,” we never know what comes next …

What’s on your Action, Blogging, and Reading list today?